An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Saturday, April 6, 2013

National Poetry Month—Allen Ginsberg "Cosmopolitan Greetings"

Today
is the anniversary of the death of Beat
poet and cultural icon Allen
Ginsberg in New York City in
1997. A Poetry Month dare not pass without his inclusion.

He was perhaps
the most lineal literary descendent of Walt Whitman as today’s poem selection may attest.

Born in Newark,
New Jersey in 1926, he was a Red Blanket baby of a pair of Jewish
radicals and members of the Greenwich Village literary Bohemia of
the Jazz Age. The life long struggle of his beloved and gifted mother Naomi with mental illness deeply
affected him, as did an early exposure to the poetry of Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. Coming of age in
Depression deepened his familial devotion to working class causes and he
entered Columbia University as a scholarship student and committed
radical.

At Columbia he
met and developed close relationships with William S. Burroughs, Neil
Cassidy, and Jack Kerouac and others who would become the avatars of
the rebellious Beat movement of
the post-war years. Ginsberg came to believe that brutally honest
expression through art, rather than conventional political activism, was the
way in which he could create profoundly revolutionary change.

After
graduation, he developed a relationship with a literary hero of the previous
generation, William Carlos Williams, who became an informal mentor and
who introduced Ginsberg into the wider literary world, providing letters of
introduction to Kenneth Rexroth and other West Coast poets when
he relocated to San Francisco. Later, when Ginsberg won a wide,
devoted following among the young, he returned the favor by turning his
audience on to Williams.

Together
Rexroth and Ginsberg made history with a public reading at the “6” Gallery
in the City by the Bay on October 7, 1955, an event often cited as “the
birth of the Beat.” It was on that occasion that Ginsberg first read his
epic stream of consciousness poem Howl.

The following
year Howl was published by Lawrence Ferlenghetti’s new City
Lights Books. Beset by censorship battles, which only encouraged a
wider audience, and the horrified consternation of most of the academic poetry
establishment, the little book went on to become one of the most widely read
and admired works of American verse in the 20th Century.

He continued to
write and produced several collections, notably Kaddish and Other Poems
in 1961. He was always frank, and often lyrical, about his homosexuality
and about his personal demons.

Like Kerouac
and other beats he immersed himself in eastern meditative religions. But
he also remained a dedicated political activist when he could use his poetry
and presence to advance the cause. He was deeply involved in the movement
to end the Vietnam War and famously led a crowd in chants of Ohm
one foggy night in Lincoln Park as the police closed in with teargas and
truncheons. He led many a free speech fight and was an early leader in
the Gay Rights movement.

Ginsberg
received many honors, including a National Book Award, but probably
because of his overt homosexuality and admitted drug use, not those high
awards, like the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes or the Kennedy
Center Honors which would have indicated a full embrace by the
establishment. He frankly didn’t care.

In later years he did join academia himself as a Distinguished Professor of
Literature at Brooklyn College, an institution dedicated to the
education of the sons and daughters of the urban proletariat.

Cosmopolitan Greetings makes very
clear his emotional tie and debt to Whitman, who is explicitly mentioned in the
text.The poem echoes personally and for
a new generation Whitman’s famous charge in Leaves of Grass:

This is what you
shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to
every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and
labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and
indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or
to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and
with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open
air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told
at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and
your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in
its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes
of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Cosmopolitan
Greetings

Stand up
against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what’s vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Freedom costs little in the U.S.
Advise only myself.
Don’t drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become
scientific data.
The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
world (after Einstein).
The universe is subjective.
Walt Whitman celebrated Person.
We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.
Universe is Person.
Inside skull is vast as outside skull.
What’s in between thoughts?
Mind is outer space.
What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound?
“First thought, best thought.”
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid.
Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.
Move with rhythm, roll with vowels.
Consonants around vowels make sense.
Savor vowels, appreciate consonants.
Subject is known by what she sees.
Others can measure their vision by what we see.
Candor ends paranoia.